P2p lending site Smava.de for the first time reached more than 1 million Euro (approx. 1.4 million US$) loan volume funded in one month. One factor contributing to this is that Smava is in the top 10 rankings for German Google search results for the keywords kredit (engl. loan) and kredite (engl. loans) since the end of May. I find it interesting that there is not one single bank site in the top ten for these search results.
Furthermore Smava profited form TV exposure, which also helped its competitor Auxmoney to achieve a record month with approx. 130,000 Euro loan volume.
In international comparison by p2p lending loan volume funded per month, Smava is in the top 5 behind Virgin Money, Kiva, Zopa UK and Lending Club.
(Source: Smava p2p lending stats; A-H are credit grades)
Today I have added the new ‘Peer to Peer Lending Jobs‘ section and started it with listing the current 4 positions startup Loanio wants to fill in Nanuet, NY.
As P2P Lending is a very new and emerging field there are very few experts who have gathered previous practical experience in this field and these are highly sought after. One example is Arkadiusz Hajduk, who founded Fairrates in Denmark, then worked for IOU Central in Canada and now works at Smava.pl in Poland. Continue reading
Positive TV coverage (see video here) on nationwide German TV on Monday during primetime caused traffic spikes at the German p2p lending services Smava and Auxmoney. The websites were partially down during Monday and Tuesday or so slow they were practicably not useable. Auxmoney reacted by temporary deactivating non-vital functions like sorting. Meanwhile stability of the web applications has been restored.
The surge in user demand led to a 20% increase in active lenders at Auxmoney and most ever parallel open loan listings (currently 332). At Smava nearly all reasonable loan listings are funded within a few days or even hours at the moment.
To encourage more loan listings Smava has upped the bonus for inviting new borrowers to 150-200 EUR (approx 200 to 275 US$) for each referral of a borrower that is success fully funded (up from 100 Euro before).
Kiva has now enacted changes in how currency risks are accounted for. The model was first proposed in March.
Now MFIs can choose “currency risk protection” for their new loans. If this option is selected lenders will have to cover any losses that arise from a devaluation of the local currency exceeding 20% (for the part that is over the 20%).
On listed loans at Kiva there will be a new information status on the “about the Loan” Section under “Currency Exchange Loss”. The status will either be:
I browsed some new loan listings today – most are still offered under the “covered” rule, one example of a loan under the new “possible” rule is this Tajikistan loan. Continue reading
